Ignoring traffic lights in old-time Phoenix


I've always been fascinated by the idea of "picking and choosing" which traffic laws to obey, and it's always made me a little nervous that you can take a driver's test and not get 100% score, and still pass. I wonder what questions did someone get wrong? Did they not know what a red light meant? Hopefully it's only the number of cars that need to be behind you if you're in a slow-moving vehicle... or something like that. I don't know? Five? Six? Twelve?

But ignoring traffic lights was something that had to have been very common in old-time Phoenix. Not only would there have been many people who just didn't understand the concept of the color code: red for stop, green for go, there would have been a lot of people who really didn't want to be told what to do, not by some gul-dern confounded light! I picture these people as the independent free-thinkers who had learned to drive an ox team at twelve, and weren't about to be told what to do, dag-nabbit!

And then of course there were some people who got a kick out of getting away with something, the same way that kids enjoy doing something behind the teacher's back. In old-time Phoenix there would have been a traffic cop on busy corners, but if he wasn't there, it was questionable as to whether everyone would obediently stop for a red light.

I enjoy talking to people about these types of things, and I've never found anyone who has found it optional to stay to the right (unless they're from Australia!). But stop signs, and traffic lights, like speed limits, seem to be something that people make a choice on for themselves. America is, after all, the land of the free, and obeying signs like "no left turn" to many people seems to be an unwarranted encroachment on their freedom to move about the country as they please. And then of course there are people who simply don't understand things like color codes, or the positioning of a light on a traffic light. Some people are color blind, and they just have to know that the red light is on the top, and the green light is on the bottom. If you've never considered that, you may be surprised at how many people, especially men, are color blind. No, I'm not color blind, but I had an uncle who was.

Whenever I see a car go blasting through a red light, which is very common in Phoenix, and has been for a very long time, I try to figure out why. Nowadays, of course, chances are that they're texting and driving, and combined with laughing at the ridiculously low speed limit of 40 that's posted for most major streets, it's bound to happen. And as I time-travel, I realize that crossing a street in Phoenix has always been dangerous, even long before cell phones!

Let's be careful out there!

Image at the top of this post: The intersection of Central and Washington in the 1940s. Looks like the cars have the green light. Hopefully when it turns red, they will stop.
Help support history adventuring, and see a lot of cool old photos of Phoenix on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more